Forgiveness : some reflections

Forgiveness can be a big struggle for so many of us. Its a topic I have written quite a few posts on in the later years of blogging as I have struggled with my own feelings of pain and disappointment at how things evolved in our family and most especially in the wake of my Mum’s death just under two years ago.

Often it is reading of another person’s journey or struggles in similar ways that we get to see things or they become clearer. Often the deeper roots of multi-generational trauma can be complex and hidden. We don’t always understand ourselves as the evolving fruit of the inter-personal continuum that plays out and is expressed in the bible in these words : “the sins of the father’s (and mothers?) will be visited on the sons (and daughters?) unto the seven generations.”

I don’t know if everyone knows the root of the word ‘sin’ comes from a word meaning ‘to miss the mark’, in any case those of us brought up in the Catholic religion were inculcated in the idea of sin and original sin. Its something I just thought about a moment ago as I read a post by someone who struggled as child with the death of her father and took it on board as her responsibility, asking for forgiveness of her ‘sins’.

It is also something I thought of today when I considered how I have struggled in my own family to help my older sisters and my oldest sister’s children too in the aftermath of our family trauma and long history of multi-generational alcoholism history.

In fact on my walk today with Jasper I was having a conversation with my great great grandfather, Thomas. I got a sense that I played out very deep aspects of his own story and he was speaking to me of the pain in his heart as he left Cornwall in 1874 with his wife and three children on the run from family and seeking a way to survive and support them. They lost a baby shortly following their arrival in Lyttleton, New Zealand and went on to have 15 more children and lose one more who also carried the name of my materal great grandmother Eliza Jane Trudgeon.

Thomas eventually became a raging alcoholic and he was incarcerated at one point in an institution, like her father Eliza Jane left NZ for Victoria at some stage in the early 1900s and gave birth to my grandmother. My grandmother then left her own mother to come to Canberra and married yet another alcoholic who was a victim of First World War injuries, and he died when my mother was only 7.

The other day on arriving at our favourite walking spot I spyed an elderly gentleman with his young grandson on a tricycle, and I felt a stab of sadness as both my grandfathers died before I was born and my step grandfather passed when I was only one, so I never got to know them. Dad lost his own father at 12 years of age and left his own country too, just like my maternal GG grandfather, so that is a pattern. At 23 I left my own country too and again at 36 not knowing it was all a part of a pattern. Mum’s father died when she was only seven and she was often left alone as her mother worked to support them both, she was an only child.

Now that my mother is gone I think of the struggles we had and of how she tried to support me and faltered after I got sober and my marriage broke down. I see that at times I pushed her away as I did not know why she was responding to my emotions in the way she did and it frustrated me that I was often told I had to put them aside. We came to logger heads a lot more than she and my second sister and often that felt very painful to me because often I got scapegoated or pushed to the outside. I see it all more clearly now, the fights and fallings out and silly things that were said and see too how we struggled, failed, and faltered in trying to love each other and develop as individuals too outside all of the family trauma (a very stunted process for me, as the youngest who also became an alcoholic up to the age of 31).

Hindsight is a great teacher and I think its very hard when we continue to blame each other for things not ever really realising the complexity of causes that lead to things panning out as they do. Hurts that we suffer can lodge very deeply and painfully in our souls leaving sore spots and wounded places that often remain painful when touched in the present time.

The best I feel we can hope for is a deeper understanding of the complexity of it all. I have been very inspired in listening to the reading of Stan Grants book Australia Day in which he deals with complex issues of wounding, resentment, blame, suffering and forgiveness. The book has a philosophical bent, as a journalist and writer and former student Grant has studied and read widely on his chosen subjects of race and identity and the struggle for healing, he discussed the role of memory and of holding on and letting go.

Today I have more forgiveness in my heart for myself and also for my family members, I see that we all struggle with our own level of awareness and understanding, and some of us remain arrested at certain levels of projection or perception in our lives. It can be hard to see that when we were hurt it often was never about us at all in the first place, instead we just got caught up in something that was far far bigger than one single person. That at least is the growing sense I am making in my own journey of forgiveness. As I understand more and feel more it seems my capacity to forgive grows as then I realise the terrible cost that comes with the terrible pain of never really knowing how to let go I forgive even more. For me lately, after many many years of anger, rage and struggle forgiveness is finally arising as the outgrowth of an authentic process of facing up to as much as I possibly can and realising my own blind spots as well as those of others.